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“Just, blow into this please, mate.”

I found myself being breathalysed for a second time on a short visit to Australia. The first was routine - some over-zealous policemen doing a pre-Christmas blitz on a remote country road - but this one was a bit unexpected. I was in a queue to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The Bridge Climb is Sydney’s latest attraction. You climb to the top of one of Australia’s great icons and then, from 450 feet above the harbour, you get one of the finest views of the city, 360 degrees around, from the mouth of the harbour as far inland as the Blue Mountains. Not that it stopped the people climbing it before the tour opened (who were mostly up there because they actually were drunk), but now they won’t allow you up if you have a hint of alcohol on your breath.

The Bridge Climb tour first started in October 1998, but it was ten years in the making. Having conceived the idea, organiser Paul Cave overcame more than 60 objections and obstacles in various departments and parliaments. Besides the safety issue, he had to ensure that the climbers do not distract car drivers or drop anything onto the cars and trains below.

The result is that all climbers wear a special suit without pockets, so that nothing can possibly drop. Cameras aren’t permitted and neither are bracelets or hairclips. I wasn’t even allowed a pen and paper. Everything, down to your issued handkerchief, has to be tied to you securely.

‘A fashion statement it is not…’, said John, our Climb leader, as we pulled ourselves into our special dull, non-distracting grey shell-suits. True enough. After a briefing and a last call for the loo (the tour lasts a couple of hours), we each donned a climbing harness. All climbers on the bridge are attached to a guide rail by a running latch (the sort used by solo yachtsmen to ensure that they do not fall overboard). Then we set off, like a line of grey-suited convicts, to the climb.

Nothing prepares you for the moment that you step out onto the lower structure of the bridge. A sense of mortality and human insignificance hits you like a sledgehammer when you see such a monumental construction. The girders were vast. Cross-beams and gantries soared around us as though we were in a space station.

One section of the climb is quite scary (it gave me a panic quite similar to parachuting). We were waiting on a wobbly hanging gantry, the wind whistling around us and the traffic thundering overhead, with nothing more than a wire-mesh floor between us and the ground a hundred and 50 feet below.

But then, moments later, we were walking on the bridge’s beautifully curved main span, gun-metal grey and millions upon millions of rivets. It’s an easy climb and so all frightening thoughts evaporated as I took in the view.

As we climbed, John told us some details about the bridge. It took 20,000 blocks of sandstone to build the stone ‘pylons’ and it requires 270,000 litres of paint to give it a makeover. Six million bolts hold the bridge together and not a single one has loosened since the bridge was opened in 1932. In the heat the bridge can expand 18 centimetres in height. 16 men died building it. Paul Hogan the comedian worked here as a young man.

From the top the city, with its meandering bays and points, looked magnificent. Beneath us was the distinctive, shell-shaped Sydney Opera House and to one side the skyscrapers of the Central Business District. John pointed out the Governor General’s mansion, the Botanical Gardens and the Glebe Island Bridge, which because of its shape is known as ‘Madonna’s Breasts’ (her pointy metal ones). Looking west, against the backdrop of the Blue Mountains, we saw Homebush, the site of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Without cameras there was no chance to take our own photographs of course, but the organisers wouldn’t miss a trick like that. John took some group and individual shots with a digital camera (which he then loaded onto the computer for us to choose from when we got down).

When we eventually did get down, the group, flushed from the wind and the sun, decided that it had been great. I agreed and although we had only climbed a few hundred steps, I had that great feeling of having done something energetic and worthwhile.

A couple of nights later on New Year’s Eve I was standing beneath the Opera House watching Sydney’s famous fireworks on the Harbour Bridge. A golden curtain shimmered beneath the traffic span and above, where I had been walking, the arch burst into an extraordinary display of shooting red and white flames. If they’d breathalysed me at that moment I would have been way over the limit, but of course I had my feet firmly on the ground.

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